Book Cover Man: Garden State

A strange tale of a 'real' Headless Horseman who serves as the 'adversary' in a Garden State experience of education-media dragons.

A fun take on Sleepy Hollow. Enjoy, 

----

====

Paul Sheld is a writer and educator at Seton Hall (NJ), and he likes the amenities of the iconic Garden State, with its offroad highway town-stops, food centers, shopping plazas, and horse-race tracks and public tourist gardens. He works with students to appreciate a 'naturalist' approach to the active lifestyle of educational imagination, drawing somewhat from homeschooling ideas/symbols made popular in modern education 'fanzine' forums on the American Net.

PAUL SHELD: I've made the education-dept. at my 'institution' a net-resource for library-like resourcing of homeschooling-IQ.

The biggest part of this American 'folk-tale' about this apparent Ichabod Crane of the Garden State, an eccentric and intelligent schoolteacher and education philosopher in a townsfolk-consciousness is not his work with homeschooling cyber-activity but with a special activity he performs with his students to encourage them to think more about the 'personalized' enthusiasm behind learning/curiosity/self-motivation --- the making of brown-paper book-covers!

PAUL SHELD: I Have my students use brown paper materials (scissors/glue/tape) to put together 'paper-covers' for their school supplies/stationery/texts/books/notebooks so they have a 'hand-on' feel of what makes educational imagination a thing of 'private' enterprise, since the brown-paper 'covers' make the texts/notes 'invisible' and hence more 'oriented' towards 'private' work, and I then blog images and ideas about these 'school brown paper' covers regarding 'hands-on' educational activities in modern America, which is why my students and peers refer to me (by alias!) as the Book Cover Man ('BCM').

Dr. Sheld has become a prominent figure in the Garden State, perhaps because it's conducive to a pluralism/populist and inter-religious approach to democratic 'classrooms' and educational media accessing on the iconic highway-state of plazas/gardens/towns. This has become his life, and his cyber-blogs in the USA as the great/eccentric 'BCM' (Book Cover Man) has turned him into a 'religious' celebrity and cultural diplomat of institutional trends.

NIGHT-SLASHER: I've read these 'cyber-texts' by this Book Cover Man in the Garden State and plan to bloody murder him as a scapegoat of flaws of education in the West, because I am indeed the 'true' prophet of institutional resource privacy, as I've become a 'dark knight' of the Hell of education's strange 'dragon' face; I will kill him!

NJ COURIER POST STORY: It seems our good teacher the BCM (Book Cover Man) has miraculously evaded his 'Headless Horseman' in the intrigued Garden State in the form of the psycho-terrorist known as the Night-Slasher who preyed upon the 'good doctor' of New Jersey with an anti-cyber 'agenda' to denounce the Western/American appreciation of Net/media-enhanced education ideology and rhetoric, but our good doctor, perhaps the real 'Ichabod Crane' of the Garden State, revealed a small miracle by 'duping' the Headless Horseman (Night-Slasher) with a swift library hide, luring him into the building and hiding behind shelves systematically while informed security-men quietly tracked the psycho-terrorist and grabbed him right before he pulled out his signature 'dragon' blade, which ends this tale of American educational preservation (and legend!).

====

"Money is everything" (Ecclesiastes)